THE CRIME AGAINST KANSAS.
SPEECH
OF
HON. CHARLES SUMNER,
OF MASSACHUSETTS.
IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, MAY 19, 1856.
MONDAY, May 19, 1&56.
MR. PRESIDENT: You are now called to redress a great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The machinery of government will continue to move. The State will not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, liberty in a broad territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country with our good name in history for evermore.
Take down your map, sir, and you will find that the territory of Kansas, more than any other region, occupies the middle spot of North America, equally distant from the Atlantic on the east, and the Pacific on the west; from the frozen waters of Hudson's Bay on the north, and the tepid gulf stream on the south, constituting the precise territorial centre of the whole vast continent. To such advantage of situation, on the very highway between two oceans, are added a soil of unsurpassed richness, and a fascinating, undulating beauty of surface, with a health-giving climate, calculated to nurture a powerful and generous people, worthy to be a central pivot of American institutions.
A few short months only have passed since this spacious mediterranean country was open only to the savage, who ran wild in its woods and prairies; and now it has already drawn to its bosom a population of freemen larger than Athens crowded within her historic gates, when her sons, under Miltiades, won liberty for mankind on the field of Marathon; more than Sparta contained when she ruled Greece, and sent forth her devoted children, quickened by a mother's benediction, to return with their shields or on them; more than Rome gathered on her seven hills, when, under her kings, she commenced that sovereign sway, which afterwards embraced the whole earth; more than London held, when, on the fields of Crecy and Agincourt, the English banner was carried victoriously over the chivalrous hosts of France.
Against this territory, thus fortunate in position and population, a crime has been committed, which is without example in the records of the past. Not in plundering provinces, nor in the cruelties of selfish governors will you find its parallel; and yet there is an ancient instance, which may show at least the path of justice. In the terrible impeachment by which the great Roman Orator has blasted through all time the name of Verres, amidst charges of robbery and sacrilege, the enormity which most aroused the indignant voice of his accuser, and which still stands forth with strongest distinctness, arresting the sympathetic indignation of all who read the story, is, that away in Sicily he had scourged a citizen of Rome - that the cry - "I am a Roman citizen," had been interposed in vain against the lash of the tyrant governor. Other charges were, that he had carried away productions of art, and that he had violated the sacred shrines.
It was in the presence of the Roman Senate that this arraignment proceeded; in a temple of the Forum, amidst crowds - such as no orator had ever before drawn together - thronging the porticoes and colonnades, even clinging to the house-tops and neighboring slopes - and under the anxious gaze of witnesses summoned from the scene of crime. But an audience grander far - of higher dignity - of more various people, and of wider intelli-
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